The boy approached the bar with the jar of peanut butter under his arm, a plate with a quarter of a small chocolate cake on it in one hand and the ketchup bottle in the other. He did not appear to notice his father. He climbed up on the stool and began to spread peanut butter on the cake. He had very large round ears that leaned away from his head and seemed to pull his eyes slightly too far apart. His shirt was green but so faded that the cowboy charging across the front of it was only a shadow.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “I saw Rufus Johnson yesterday.
Do you know what he was doing?”
The child looked at him with a kind of half attention, his eyes forward but not yet engaged. They were a paler blue than his father’s as if they might have faded like the shirt, one of them listed, almost imperceptibly, toward the outer rim.
“He was in an alley,” Sheppard said, “and he had his hand in a garbage can. He was trying to get something to eat out of it.” He paused to let this soak in. “He was hungry,” he finished, and tried to pierce the child’s conscience with his gaze.
The boy picked up the piece of chocolate cake and began to gnaw it from one comer.
“Norton,” Sheppard said, “do you have any idea what it means to share?”
A flicker of attention. “Some of it’s yours,” Norton said.
“Some of it’s his,” Sheppard said heavily. It was hopeless. Almost any fault would have been preferable to selfishness—a violent temper, even a tendency to lie.
The child turned the bottle of ketchup upsidedown and began thumping ketchup onto the cake.
Sheppard’s look of pain increased. “You are ten and Rufus Johnson is fourteen,” he said. “Yet I’m sure your shirts would fit Rufus.” Rufus Johnson was a boy he had been trying to help at the reformatory for the past year. He had been released two months ago. “When he was in the reformatory, he looked pretty good, but when I saw him yesterday, he was skin and bones. He hasn’t been eating cake with peanut butter on it for breakfast.”
The child paused. “It’s stale,” he said. “That’s why I have to put stuff on it.”
Sheppard turned his face to the window at the end of the bar. The side lawn, green and even, sloped fifty feet or so down to a small suburban wood. When his wife was living, they had often eaten outside, even breakfast, on the grass. He had never noticed then that the child was selfish. “Listen to me,” he said, turning back to him, “look at me and listen.”
The boy looked at him. At least his eyes were forward.
“I gave Rufus a key to this house when he left the reformatory—to show my confidence in him and so he would have a place he could come to and feel welcome any time. He didn’t use it, but I think he’ll use it now because he’s seen me and he’s hungry. And if he doesn’t use it, I’m going out and find him and bring him here. I can’t see a child eating out of garbage cans.”
The boy frowned. It was dawning upon him that something of his was threatened.
Sheppard’s mouth stretched in disgust. “Rufus’s father died before he was born,” he said. “His mother is in the state penitentiary. He was raised by his grandfather in a shack without water or electricity and the old man beat him every day. How would you like to belong to a family like that?”
“I don’t know,” the child said lamely.
“Well, you might think about it sometime,” Sheppard said.
Sheppard was City Recreational Director. On Saturdays he worked at the reformatory as a counselor, receiving nothing for it but the satisfaction of knowing he was helping boys no one else cared about. Johnson was the most intelligent boy he had worked with and the most deprived.
Norton turned what was left of the cake over as if he no longer wanted it.
“Maybe he won’t come,” the child said and his eyes brightened slightly.
“Think of everything you have that he doesn’t!” Sheppard said. “Suppose you had to root in garbage cans for food? Suppose you had a huge swollen foot and one side of you dropped lower than the other when you walked?”
The boy looked blank, obviously unable to imagine such a thing.
“You have a healthy body,” Sheppard said, “a good home. You’ve never been taught anything but the truth.Your daddy gives you everything you need and want. You don’t have a grandfather who beats you. And your mother is not in the state penitentiary.”
The child pushed his plate away. Sheppard groaned aloud.
A knot of flesh appeared below the boy’s suddenly distorted mouth. His face became a mass of lumps with slits for eyes. “If she was in the penitentiary,” he began in a kind of racking bellow, “I could go to seeeeee her.” Tears rolled down his face and the ketchup dribbled on his chin. He looked as if he had been hit in the mouth. He abandoned himself and howled.
Sheppard sat helpless and miserable, like a man lashed by some elemental force of nature. This was not a normal grief. It was all part of his selfishness. She had been dead for over a year and a child’s grief should not last so long. “You’re going on eleven years old,” he said reproachfully.
The child began an agonizing high-pitched heaving noise.
“If you stop thinking about yourself and think what you can do for somebody else,” Sheppard said, “then you’ll stop missing your mother.”
The boy was silent but his shoulders continued to shake. Then his face collapsed and he began to howl again.
“Don’t you think I’m lonely without her too?” Sheppard said. “Don’t you think I miss her at all? I do, but I’m not sitting around moping. I’m busy helping other people. When do you see me just sitting around thinking about my troubles?”
The boy slumped as if he were exhausted but fresh tears streaked his face.
“What are you going to do today?” Sheppard asked, to get his mind on something else.
The child ran his arm across his eyes. “Sell seeds,” he mumbled.
Always selling something. He had four quart jars full of nickels and dimes he had saved and he took them out of his closet every few days and counted them. “What are you selling seeds for?”
“To win a prize.”
“What’s the prize?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“And what would you do if you had a thousand dollars?”
“Keep it,” the child said and wiped his nose on his shoulder.
“I feel sure you would,” Sheppard said. “Listen,” he said and lowered his voice to an almost pleading tone, “suppose by some chance you did win a thousand dollars. Wouldn’t you like to spend it on children less fortunate than yourself? Wouldn’t you like to give some swings and trapezes to the orphanage? Wouldn’t you like to buy poor Rufus Johnson a new shoe?”
The boy began to back away from the bar. Then suddenly he leaned forward and hung with his mouth open over his plate. Sheppard groaned again. Everything came up, the cake, the peanut butter, the ketchup—a limp sweet batter. He hung over it gagging, more came, and he waited with his mouth open over the plate as if he expected his heart to come up next.
“It’s all right,” Sheppard said, “it’s all right. You couldn’t help it. Wipe your mouth and go lie down.”
The child hung there a moment longer. Then he raised his face and looked blindly at his father.
“Go on,” Sheppard said. “Go on and lie down.”
The boy pulled up the end of his t-shirt and smeared his mouth with it. Then he climbed down off the stool and wandered out of the kitchen.
Sheppard sat there staring at the puddle of half-digested food. The sour odor reached him and he drew back. His gorge rose. He got up and carried the plate to the sink and turned the water on it and watched grimly as the mess ran down the drain. Johnson’s sad thin hand rooted in garbage cans for food while his own child, selfish, unresponsive, greedy, had so much that he threw it up. He cut off the faucet with a thrust of his fist. Johnson had a capacity for real response and had been deprived of everything from birth; Norton was average or below and had had every advantage.
He went back to the bar to finish his breakfast. The cereal was soggy in the cardboard box but he paid no attention to what he was eating. Johnson was worth any amount of effort because he had the potential. He had seen it from the time the boy had limped in for his first interview.
Sheppard’s office at the reformatory was a narrow closet with one window and a small table and two chairs in it. He had never been inside a confessional but he thought it must be the same kind of operation he had here, except that he explained, he did not absolve. His credentials were less dubious than a priest’s; he had been trained for what he was doing.
When Johnson came in for his first interview, he had been reading over the boy’s record—senseless destruction, windows smashed, city trash boxes set afire, tires slashed—the kind of thing he found where boys had been transplanted abruptly from the country to the city as this one had. He came to Johnson’s I. Q. score. It was 140. He raised his eyes eagerly.
The boy sat slumped on the edge of his chair, his arms hanging between his thighs. The light from the window fell on his face. His eyes, steel-colored and very still, were trained narrowly forward. His thin dark hair hung in a Hat forelock across the side of his forehead, not carelessly like a boy’s, but fiercely like an old man’s. A kind of fanatic intelligence was palpable in his face.
Sheppard smiled to diminish the distance between them.
The boy’s expression did not soften. He leaned back in his chair and lifted a monstrous club foot to his knee. The foot was in a heavy black battered shoe with a sale four or five inches thick. The leather parted from it in one place and the end of an empty sock protruded like a grey tongue from a severed head. The case was clear to Sheppard instantly. His mischief was compensation for the foot.
“Well Rufus,” he said, “I see by the record here that you don’t have but a year to serve. What do you plan to do when you get out?”
“I don’t make no plans,” the boy said. His eyes shifted indifferently to something outside the window behind Sheppard in the far distance.
“Maybe you ought to,” Sheppard said and smiled.
Johnson continued to gaze beyond him.
” I want to see you make the most of your intelligence,” Sheppard said. “What’s important to you? Let’s talk about what’s important to you.” His eyes dropped involuntarily to the foot.
“Study it and git your fill,” the boy drawled.
Sheppard reddened. The black deformed mass swelled before his eyes. He ignored the remark and the leer the boy was giving him. “Rufus,” he said, “you’ve got into a lot of senseless trouble but I think when you understand why you do these things, you’ll be less inclined to do them.” He smiled. They had so few friends, saw so few pleasant faces, that half his effectiveness came from nothing more than smiling at them. “There are a lot of things about yourself that I think I can explain to you,” he said.
Johnson looked at him stonily. “I ain’t asked for no explanation,” he said. “I already know why I do what I do.”
“Well good!” Sheppard said. “Suppose you tell me what’s made you do the things you’ve done?”
A black sheen appeared in the boy’s eyes. “Satan,” he said. “He has me in his power.”
Sheppard looked at him steadily. There was no indication on the boy’s face that he had said this to be funny.
The line of his thin mouth was set with pride. Sheppard’s eyes hardened. He felt a momentary dull despair as if he were faced with some elemental warping of nature that had happened too long ago to be corrected now. This boy’s questions about life had been answered by signs nailed on pine trees: DOES SATAN HAVE YOU IN HIS POWER? REPENT OR BURN IN HELL. JESUS SAVES He would know the Bible with or without reading it. His despair gave way to outrage. “Rubbish!” he snorted. ‘We’re living in the space age! You’re too smart to give me an answer like that.”
Johnson’s mouth twisted slightly. His look was contemptuous but amused. There was a glint of challenge in his eyes.
Sheppard scrutinized his face. Where there was intelligence anything was possible. He smiled again, a smile that was like an invitation to the boy to come into a school room with all its windows thrown open to the light. “Rufus,” he said, “I’m going to arrange for you to have a conference with me once a week. Maybe there’s an explanation for your explanation. Maybe I can explain your devil to you.”
After that he had talked to Johnson every Saturday for the rest of the year. He talked at random, the kind of talk the boy would never have heard before. He talked a little above him to give him something to reach for. He roamed from simple psychology and the dodges of the human mind to astronomy and the space capsules that were whirling around the earth faster than the speed of sound and would soon encircle the stars. Instinctively he concentrated on the stars. He wanted to give the boy something to reach for besides his neighbor’s goods. He wanted to stretch his horizons. He wanted him to see the universe, to see that the darkest parts of it could be penetrated. He would have given anything to be able to put a telescope in Johnson’s hands.
Johnson said little and what he did say, for the sake of his pride, was in dissent or senseless contradiction, with the clubfoot raised always to his knee like a weapon ready for use, but Sheppard was not deceived. He watched his eyes and every week he saw something in them crumble. From the boy’s face, hard but shocked, braced against the light that was ravaging him, he could see that he was hitting dead center.
Johnson was free now to live out of garbage cans and rediscover his old ignorance. The injustice of it was infuriating. He had been sent back to the grandfather; the old man’s imbecility could only be imagined. Perhaps the boy had by now run away from him. The idea of getting custody of Johnson had occurred to Sheppard before, but the fact of the grandfather had stood in the way. Nothing excited him so much as thinking what he could do for such a boy. First he would have him fitted for a new orthopedic shoe. His back was thrown out of line every time he took a step. Then he would encourage him in some particular intellectual interest. He thought of the telescope. He could buy a second-hand one and they could set it up in the attic window. He sat for almost ten minutes thinking what he could do if he had Johnson here with him. What was wasted on Norton would cause Johnson to flourish. Yesterday when he had seen him with his hand in the garbage can, he had waved and started forward. Johnson had seen him, paused a split-second, then vanished with the swiftness of a rat but not before Sheppard had seen his expression change: Something had kindled in the boy’s eyes, he was sure of it, some memory of the lost light.
He got up and threw the cereal box in the garbage. Before he left the house, he looked into Norton’s room to be sure he was not stilI sick. The child was sitting crosslegged on his bed. He had emptied the quart jars of change into one large pile in front of him, and was sorting it out by nickels and dimes and quarters.
That afternoon Norton was alone in the house, squatting on the floor of his room arranging packages of flower seeds in rows around himself. Rain slashed against the window panes and rattled in the gutters. The room had grown dark but every few minutes it was lit by silent lightning and the seed packages showed up gaily on the floor. He squatted motionless like a large pale frog in the midst of this potential garden. All at once his eyes became alert. Without warning the rain had stopped. The silence was heavy as if the downpour had been hushed by violence. He remained motionless, only his eyes turning.
Into the silence came the distinct click of a key turning in the front door lock. The sound was a very deliberate one. It drew attention to itself and held it as if it were controlled more by a mind than by a hand. The child leapt up and got into the closet.
The footsteps began to move in the hall. They were deliberate and irregular, a light and then a heavy one, then a silence as if the visitor had paused to listen himself or to examine something. In a minute the kitchen door screeked. The footsteps crossed the kitchen to the refrigerator. The closet wall and the kitchen wall were
the same. Norton stood with his ear pressed against it. The refrigerator door opened. There was a prolonged silence.
He took off his shoes and then tiptoed out of the closet and stepped over the seed packages. In the middle of the room, he stopped and remained where he was, rigid. A thin bony-faced boy in a wet black suit stood in his door, blocking his escape. His hair was flattened to his skull by the rain. He stood there like an irate drenched crow. His look went through the child like a pin and paralyzed him. Then his eyes began to move over everything in the room—the unmade bed, the dirty curtains on the one large window, a photograph of a wide-faced young woman that stood up in the clutter on top of the dresser.
The child’s tongue suddenly went wild. “He’s been expecting you, he’s going to give you a new shoe because you have to eat out of garbage cans!” he said in a kind of mouselike shriek.
“I eat out of garbage cans,” the boy said slowly with a beady stare, ‘because I like to eat out of garbage cans. See?”
The child nodded.
“And I got ways of getting my own shoe. See?”
The child nodded, mesmerized.
The boy limped in and sat down on the bed. He arranged a pillow behind him and stretched his short leg out so that the big black shoe rested conspicuously on a fold of the sheet.
Norton’s gaze settled on it and remained immobile. The sole was as thick as a brick.
Johnson wiggled it slightly and smiled. “If I kick somebody once with this,” he said, “it learns them not to mess with me.”
The child nodded.
“Go in the kitchen,” Johnson said, “and make me a sandwich with some of that rye bread and ham and bring me a glass of milk.”
The Complete Stories Page 50
